2025 Best Physical Therapy/Therapist Doctor's Degree Schools
221Colleges in the United States
13,307Doctor's Degrees
Ranked #4 in popularity, physical therapy/therapist is one of the most sought-after doctor's degree programs in the nation. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
College Factual reviewed 221 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for doctor's degree seekers in the field of physical therapy/therapist. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 13,307 doctor's degrees in physical therapy/therapist during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Physical Therapy/Therapist School for Your Doctor's Degree
The physical therapy doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality physical therapy program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on physical therapy/therapist students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other physical therapy/therapist students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized physical therapy/therapist related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for physical therapy/therapist students working on their doctor's degree.
The physical therapy school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Physical Therapy/Therapist Doctor's Degree Schools.
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ADBLOCK #171
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Physical Therapy/Therapist in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in physical therapy/therapist. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
25 Top Schools for a Doctorate in Physical Therapy
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Honorable Mentions
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Physical Therapy/Therapist Doctor's Degree Schools award.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).